The Growler: Recent Episodes
Ursinus College
These recordings were created by Breakaway for the Ursinus College Fringe Festival 2020.
"Birthday Cake"
Playwright: Kate Foley (2023)
Director: Claire Hughes (2020)
Cast: Jaz: Donovan Erskine (2021) Mary: Ruby Serafin (2020)
These recordings were created by Breakaway for the Ursinus College Fringe Festival 2020.
"Stonehenge"
Playwright: Claire Hughes (2020)
Directors: Kate Foley (2023)
Casts: Sarah: Gabby DeMelfi (2021) Ron: Ben Johnson (2020)
These recordings were created by Breakaway for the Ursinus College Fringe Festival 2020.
"Haunted House"
Playwright: Kate Foley (2023
Directors: Ruby Serafin (2020)
Cast: Real Estate Agent: Claire Hughes (2020) Ghost: Austin Brzezicki (2023) Potential Buyers: Gabby DeMelfi (2021) and Myla Haan (2021)
Mary Atta-Dakwa '18 and Johannes Karreth reflect on each other's research on the role of the international community in preventing civil wars and helping rebuild countries after civil war. Hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations. o Mary Atta-Dakwa's interdisciplinary honors thesis in Applied Economics and International Relations investigated the role of economic growth/development of Rwanda during its post-war reconstruction, following the genocide in 1994. o Using a statistical analysis of economic growth patterns over time, Atta-Dakwa finds that foreign aid alone did not have a strong effect on economic growth, but in the presence of an effective government aid is robustly associated with a growing Rwandan economy. o Johannes Karreth's new book Incentivizing Peace shows how the international community can help prevent civil wars in the first place. o He emphasizes the role of highly structured IGOs such as the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, or the Economic Community of West African States. These institutions can provide incentives to governments and dissidents to settle political disputes peacefully, without resorting to massive violence. Evidence from all political conflicts between 1946-2000 and select cases shows that conflicts in countries with more connections to highly structured IGOs faced a considerably lower risk of escalation to civil wars. o Both projects suggests that the international community can play a positive role in violence prevention and post-conflict reconstruction, but their impact depends on national governments and institutionalized incentives. Mary Atta-Dakwa '18 graduated as a double major in Applied Economics and International Relations, and a minor in Spanish. Her honors thesis "Aiding to Repair: An Analysis on the Impact of Foreign Aid in Rwanda After the 1994 Genocide" was supervised by Dr. Annie Karreth (Politics) and Dr. Olga Nicoara (Business & Economics). She also served as head delegate to the Ursinus College delegation to the National Model United Nations conference in 2018. Johannes Karreth (Ph.D., University of Colorado Boulder) is an assistant professor of Politics and International Relations. He specializes in the study of international institutions and examines their role in resolving conflicts in different issue areas. His classes at Ursinus include Markets, Money & Migration, War and Peace, and Terrorism & Political Violence. He also advises the Model United Nations program, facilitating student's participation in the annual National Model United Nations conference in New York City.
Dr. Jayatri Das, Chief Bioscientist at The Franklin Institute, explains her passion for communicating science to the public, a task more essential than ever in today’s changing society.
Currently, Dr. Das is working on new exhibits at The Franklin Institute about the human brain and sports. She is also involved in national programs to help communicate advances in nanotechnology and materials science to audiences in science centers across the country.
Her career in science began as a double-major at Penn State University where she earned a B.S. in biology and a B.S. in biochemistry and molecular biology. Awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship in Biological Sciences, she went on to earn her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University. Afterwards, she took a position as a postdoctoral researcher in biology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Before joining The Franklin Institute, Jayatri was awarded a Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellowship from The National Academies, during which she conducted evaluation and developed programs for the Marian Koshland Science Museum in Washington, DC. Currently, she serves on the advisory board of Cogito.org, an online community of gifted precollege students run by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. She is also an invited Fellow of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Ian Simon reflects on the satisfactions and challenges of a career in science policy, and on the chain of events that moved him from bench science to policy analysis.
Graduating from Yale University with a PhD in microbiology, Dr. Simon has studied international science policy in South Korea and has served as Health and Science Adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and as a Foreign Affairs Officer at the U.S. Department of State. Now a Policy Analyst at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, he provides rigorous and objective analysis of science policy issues for the White House. Sponsored by the Parlee Center for Science and the Common Good.
-We discussed how professors can be both educators and advocators, and while many people attempt to separate those two roles that isn't always the best method, particularly in environmental studies. -We talked about how companies like Monsanto accumulate large amounts of power. Currently Monsanto nearly monopolizes the GMO market, a fact which affords them a dangerous amount of power in the production and regulation of GM crops. -We talked about how the public occasionally misunderstands that GM crops aren't dangerous to consume, based on current evidence. Moreover, we discussed that this misunderstanding persists because fear-mongering is so effective. -We talked about which methods of farming would be most sustainable in the face of climate change -Finally we discussed how we, as students advocates and citizens can continue to oppose structures of power in our lives.
Mr. Hunter examines how many people we need to feed by 2050 and how this can be done sustainably.
Mitch Hunter is a PhD candidate in Agronomy at Penn State University, working with Dr. David Mortensen in the Weed and Applied Plant Ecology Lab. He is first author on a important paper, co-authored with Dave Mortensen, that disputes the widely repeated claim that food production must double by 2050 to feed the world’s growing population. “In the coming decades, agriculture will be called upon to both feed people and ensure a healthy environment,” says Hunter. “Right now, the narrative in agriculture is really out of balance, with compelling goals for food production but no clear sense of the progress we need to make on the environment. To get the agriculture we want in 2050, we need quantitative targets for both food production and environmental impacts.”
Mr. Hunter draws inspiration from time spent working on Hunter family farms in Minnesota and Illinois and on ranches in California and Nevada. Prior to coming to Penn State he was the Federal Policy Manager with American Farmland Trust in Washington, DC, where he promoted on-farm conservation in the federal Farm Bill. He received a B.A. in Government from Harvard University following two years of liberal arts study, self-governance, and student labor at Deep Springs College.
Dr. David Mortensen, an expert on ecologically-based pest management, argues that our dependence on genetically-engineered (GE), herbicide-resistant crops threaten our ability to sustainably feed the growing world population.
Dr. Mortensen, Professor of Weed and Applied Plant Ecology at Penn State University, is an expert on ecologically-based pest management and sustainability. His work explores the interplay between the ecology of agricultural fields, field edges, and forest fragments. Practical applications include reducing reliance on herbicide use and making weedy plant management more sustainable.
Dr. Mortensen, argues that GM herbicide-resistant crops have created “lock-in” in our approach to agriculture, making it difficult to escape our dependency on these crops. Instead, he advocates redirecting our approach to agriculture with more thoughtful and ecologically informed systems thinking.
Chin is the author of a novel and four esteemed poetry collections, including Hard Love Province, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for a work of literature that “confronts racism and examines diversity”; other recipients of this award include Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston. A pioneering feminist, Asian American writer, Chin’s writings have been widely anthologized and featured at the Library of Congress and on Bill Moyers’ series PBS Poetry Everywhere and The Language of Life among other venues. About Chin’s poems, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove noted, “In these sad and beautiful poems, a withering portrayal of our global ‘society’ emerges–from Buddha to Allah, Mongols to Bethesda Boys, Humvee to war horse, Dachau to West Darfur, Irrawaddy River to San Diego.”